Cited by 81Artificial Intelligence in LawTopic ModelingExplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Limitations of the LLM-as-a-Judge Approach for Evaluating LLM Outputs in Expert Knowledge Tasks

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Szymanski, Annalisa, Ziems, Noah, Eicher-Miller, Heather A., Li, Toby Jia-Jun, Jiang, Meng, Metoyer, Ronald A.·2025·Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces

Abstract

The potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) themselves to evaluate LLM outputs offers a promising method for assessing model performance across various contexts. Previous research indicates that LLM-as-a-judge exhibits a strong correlation with human judges in the context of general instruction following. However, for instructions that require specialized knowledge, the validity of using LLMs as judges remains uncertain. In our study, we applied a mixed-methods approach, conducting pairwise comparisons in which both subject matter experts (SMEs) and LLMs evaluated outputs from domain-specific tasks. We focused on two distinct fields: dietetics, with registered dietitian experts, and mental health, with clinical psychologist experts. Our results showed that SMEs agreed with LLM judges 68% of the time in the dietetics domain and 64% in mental health when evaluating overall preference. Additionally, the results indicated variations in SME-LLM agreement across domain-specific aspect questions. Our findings emphasize the importance of keeping human experts in the evaluation process, as LLMs alone may not provide the depth of understanding required for complex, knowledge specific tasks. We also explore the implications of LLM evaluations across different domains and discuss how these insights can inform the design of evaluation workflows that ensure better alignment between human experts and LLMs in interactive systems.

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  • LLM-as-a-judge evaluation is known to be unreliable for expert-domain quality judgment.

    “LLM-as-a-judge evaluation is known to be unreliable for expert-domain quality judgment (Dorner et al., 2025;Szymanski et al., 2025).”

    From On Epistemic Diversity in Large Language Models (2026) · cites this paper as Szymanski et al., 2025

    The paper reports that LLM judges agreed with subject-matter experts 68% of the time in dietetics and 64% in mental health (p. 1). Its Discussion (p. 13) warns against relying solely on LLMs for expert-knowledge tasks. These findings support a concern about reliability, but the claim states it categorically across expert domains, while the study examines two domains and describes the broader validity question as uncertain. (LLM, conf=0.83)

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  • Szymanski et al. (2025) found only moderate agreement between GPT-4's ratings and domain professionals on a dataset of 25 questions in dietetics and mental health.

    “Szymanski et al. (2025) examines LLM-as-a-judge in the domains of dietetics and mental health by comparing GPT-4's ratings to those of domain professionals, finding only moderate agreement on a dataset of 25 questions.”

    From No Free Labels: Limitations of LLM-as-a-Judge Without Human Grounding (2025) · cites this paper as Szymanski et al. (2025)

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Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. [2][2] Josh Achiam, Steven Adler, Sandhini Agarwal, Lama Ahmad, Ilge Akkaya, Florencia Leoni Aleman, Diogo Almeida, Janko Altenschmidt, Sam Altman, Shyamal Anadkat, et al. 2023. Gpt-4 technical report. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.08774 (2023). - · arXiv
  2. [3][3] Jaewoo Ahn, Taehyun Lee, Junyoung Lim, Jin-Hwa Kim, Sangdoo Yun, Hwaran Lee, and Gunhee Kim. 2024. TimeChara: Evaluating Point-in-Time Character Hallucination of Role-Playing Large Language Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.18027 (2024). - · arXiv
  3. [6][6] Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. 2019. Reflecting on reflexive thematic analysis. Qualitative research in sport, exercise and health 11, 4 (2019), 589-597. -
  4. [8][8] Guiming Hardy Chen, Shunian Chen, Ziche Liu, Feng Jiang, and Benyou Wang. 2024. Humans or llms as the judge? a study on judgement biases. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.10669 (2024). - · arXiv
  5. [10][10] Wei-Lin Chiang, Lianmin Zheng, Ying Sheng, Anastasios Nikolas Angelopoulos, Tianle Li, Dacheng Li, Hao Zhang, Banghua Zhu, Michael Jordan, Joseph E Gonzalez, et al. 2024. Chatbot arena: An open platform for evaluating llms by human preference. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.04132 (2024). Manuscript submitted to ACM · arXiv

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Authors
Szymanski, A., Ziems, N., Eicher-Miller, H. A., Li, T. J.-J., Jiang, M., & Metoyer, R. A.
Affiliations
  • University of Notre Dame (US)
  • Nutrition Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA,
Venue
Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
Publisher
ACM
Published
2025-03-24
Pages
952-966
OpenAlex
W4408615073
Cited by
77
References
27
Citations by year
2026: 48 · 2025: 28 · 2024: 1
FWCI
469.83
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
  • USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (2021-67022-33447)
  • Office of Naval Research (N00014-22-1-2507)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Artificial Intelligence in Law
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Keywords
large language models, LLM-as-a-judge, evaluation limitations

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